However, he found that despite the perception of Australians as fun-loving, beach-obsessed larrikins, such advertising – particularly in aussieBum’s early days in the 2000s – only had a very niche appeal here.

“In different countries, people have, let’s call it, different tolerances for different ways of marketing. Australia is very conservative,” he says.

“[When it comes to sex sells], in Australia, we’re not used to that. So when they started to get a taste of my marketing and with the brand, it was automatically pigeonholed as “Oh, you know, that’s just a little bit too ... No, no, no, no.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Sean says his overt marketing has much more success in the likes of America and Europe than here in Australia.

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“What’s interesting is that there are billboards that we run in the UK, Germany and LA that run without any incident. In Australia, we’re not even allowed to put those images up because they feel that people will find it offensive, which I find ridiculous.”

However, Sean says that attitudes are slowly changing in Australia, meaning that more overt marketing and advertising are becoming increasingly accepted.

“Today it’s matured a little bit more, and we’ve got a bus campaign for example running, and there’s a man with a pair of underwear and he’s very beautiful. The Australians are warming to that more,” he says.

Hear more insights from Sean, who took $30,000 in savings and turned it into a business that delivered $150 million in sales, on the My Business Podcast below: